“…First have a definite, clear, practical ideal–a goal, an objective. Second have the necessary means to achieve your ends–wisdom, money, material, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.” –Aristotle VMworld is next week, and as expected we are already starting to see announcements from VMware and its massive partner ecosystem. This has me thinking a lot about how large organizations choose to adopt new technology, and how it is eventually implemented. IT culture is strange. It is notoriously risk-adverse (especially in large organizations). Since change always comes with at least some element of risk, the tendency is to recoil from it (at least initially). However the technology that drives and supports this industry is in a nearly constant state of flux. As a result, these two elements seem to be fundamentally opposed to one another. To complicate matters further, it is often difficult to identify what is likely a true shift in the industry over what is simply some new product that a vendor is pushing. Change does...